Hi guys Chris here, so I've got my Xiaomi Mi max I've had it for one year been
using it as my daily phone and I really do like i.t I've reviewed a lot of mobile
phones if you're familiar with my channel you would see that I've checked
out all sorts of flagship mobiles but I keep returning to this one because of it
stellar battery life, very good battery life and a large
immersive screen that's easy to type on it's great for looking at movies, video
content, YouTube things like that. However it's not perfect it does have a
rather weak build to it, the design and the rear camera really isn't that good
at all often it's got auto focus problems, it's hopeless at low light or
indoor shots and then the front-facing camera as well as a little bit average
there so that's where the Mi Max 2 comes in, its successor where Xiaomi
have focused on those problem areas I've improved a design it's now unibody with
antenna lines it has a new rear facing camera which is the Sony IMX 386
the same camera sensor used in the Mi 6. But in the Mi 6 it has optical
image stabilization this one doesn't unfortunately. Its got a type C port on
there front-facing loudspeaker and they've done a bad thing which is
downgrade to CPU it's the Snapdragon 625 which is a very efficient CPU and that
coupled with the new battery size which is five thousand three hundred million
hours should offer phenomenal battery life so for me it's not going to bother
me too much but I was really hoping for the Snapdragon 630 or the Snapdragon 660
so it's sad to see there has not decided to use the newest Qualcomm chips. So
let's get this one unboxed here. So the seller I used Hong Kong gold way these
guys sell on Aliexpress very good service, I've used them quite a few times
they're quite quick at getting the new Xiaomi releases and I did ask for it to
be factory sealed still so they haven't tampered with this at all has not been
open which is great you can see they're just a couple of those specs
2.5 D glass battery capacity and on the front this is the 4 gigabyte
64 gigabyte emmc version there is another version that supports 128
gigabytes of storage and both of them support micro SD cards so you can expand
upon that okay we've got an instruction leaflet that's come out here that looks
the all in Chinese and there's some tools inside there the phone aside for a
second got a USB 2 type-c cable and then our charger which is a cooked charger
because it is rated to 12 volts 1.5 amps max there
oh well that feels so much better in hand because it's got those rounded
corners on there and that unibody housing so there's a pre applied screen
protector this is just the transit that's one you need to pull off and then
just the sticker on the back and there's also one covering the camera now looking
at the rear of the me max 2 compared to the Mean Max you can see that the
location of the fingerprint reader is an exact same location the camera as well
but they've moved the LED flash which is dual tone to the left of the camera
module now that camera module doesn't have optical image stabilization but it
is upgraded it's the Sony IMX 386 the pixel size is 1.25 microns so they're
larger pixels then a 16 megapixel camera that's on the max and the aperture is F
2.2 just to point out that there max the version 1 has plastic top and bottom and
this now has antenna lines and the unibody housing which feels so much
better a lot higher quality with an overall better more rigid frame to it
now the front of the devices looks almost identical but got a white face
there is no black version unfortunately but the bezels are meant to be a little
bit smaller around the IPS panel I'll find out when I powered that on soon so
we've got capacitive new keys at the bottom at the front and
F 2.0 5 megapixel camera I'm unsure whether they've upgraded that module
hopefully they have in it's an improvement over the me max but I can
see the earpiece is slightly smaller so on the bottom we have the loudspeaker
type C port and microphone they've made it symmetrical the design just looks a
little bit nicer just like the me max now good to see
they've put some Torx screws in there what this means is that hopefully when
you drop it it won't split apart which is what happens with this I've dropped
this before and the whole rear and the front split apart but those screws
should stop that from happening on the left side you'll find this SIM tray so
it will take two Sims or once and a micro SD card you can see there the
antenna line whereas the me max just has that plastic on the top which is a
slightly different tone to the rest of the body and on the top you'll find the
3.5 millimeter headphone jack secondary microphone this is for noise
cancellation and in video and the IR transmitter and lastly on the right the
power and volume buttons now these are made out of metal they have a good feel
to them they don't rattle around either which is great just to point out too
that the camera module sits completely flush unlike the me max so overall the
build quality is great this is a huge step up over the original version so if
thickness comes in at seven point five nine millimeters which is really good so
it's nice and thin even though this is of course a very large mobile so the
phone weighs in at 212 grams which is 12 grams heavier than its predecessor okay
so time to power it on for the first time and just run through the setup okay
so me ui8 and because this is the Chinese version that I got we've got
Asian languages Tibetan and English global ROM will probably be released
down the track and say in one or two months or so don't let's get adding a
mobile network now just quickly go through this to get it
up and now I need to proceed to add a finger here and you just need to tap
your finger on the sensor on the red air ten times so I've done that so setup is
complete I've just locked it as you can see and I'm going to place my finger on
there and locks pretty much instantly there okay that time it didn't work that
was my own fault there we go sander place it on there now it's not
quite instant it's a little bit of a delay there but it seems to be
reasonably accurate I did set that up super fast of course so you can see that
that super ugly bezel that surround the screen that black bezels what I'm
talking about has been lessened slightly compared to the first model they're
pretty much tabbed it there which is good so it doesn't look as bad so I can
see there's a few black bear applications on there well actually
quite a few if you look under more apps but literally all of these can be
uninstalled which is great now if you want a ROM that is completely free of
Chinese then you're going to have to wait for that to global run that I
mentioned earlier because in the dialer you're still going to see some Chinese
characters and things pop up now and then there's the yellow pages and other
things that really aren't valid to us you see that all Chinese related so of
course no one really wants that outside of China so that's why you get the
global wrong so have a look now and see what version it's running I will check a
course later on for an over-the-air update so here we can see that it's
running the UI eight point five point six and it says it's the stable version
and that is based off Android seven point one point one which is good that's
a very new Android ROM now and our free available space on first boot is
approximately fifty three gigabytes there so you've got a bit of space here
to play with straight away it prompted me for a firmware update which it's
automatically downloading so this one as soon as I connect it up to the wireless
prompted me to download it it's a massive update it's a whole full run as
you can see 1.4 gigabytes so I ran the latest version of n22 on both of the
devices and you can see this is the Mae UConn on the max2 the fact that it's
about 15,000 points less and n22 and that main difference coming from the GPU
performance you can see there what mainly the GPU and then the RAM
performance is a little bit less so if you're a gamer and you want the best
performance and also a cheaper device then you'd probably want to go for the
first model the ROM doesn't come with Google Play pre-installed because as the
Chinese ROM but it's not too hard to install it I've already done that now
you can see Google Play here and as far as I can tell there are no problems
running it and the performance of the ROM has been good so far I haven't seen
any major studies or language I'm surprised that because previous
Snapdragon 65 devices I have noticed now then you see a little more stutters than
say other chipsets like these 650 now to install it there's a link in the
description if you want Google playing you are going to get the Chinese version
just a matter of moving over some files and then restoring that via backup and
that will give you Google Play contact syncs and a few other things just so you
get an idea of just how large the me max 2 is compared to other devices so this
is the samsung galaxy 6 edge plus at 5.7 inches and it's dwarfing it quite
clearly that fits inside there and the Samsung Galaxy s7 which is my current
second phone that I use when I go out when I want some decent photos because I
really do like the camera on the smile bar but you can see difference there is
massive so you see you need to factor that in if you can fit this in your
pocket whatever now don't knock the larger phone until
you try and trust me on this because when I first got this s4 wow this is
just too huge its massive there's no way I'm going to hang on to the phone and
keep it and Here I am a year later still using it when I go back to my samsung
galaxy s7 I find it feels like a toy it feels very small and often typing on the
keyboard I have more typos as a result and I've just gotten so used to the
keyboard here on the larger version with the larger screen it just makes typing a
real breeze here now put Google's keyboard on here the G board because I
absolutely hate the stock Xiaomi one that you get that's what I
find to be a lot better so it's going to quickly load it in a page so I'm not a
speed typist and you think and have loaded this before the performance of
the Snapdragon six to five so if I seems decent it's good I find that it's a CPU
for everyone of course it's more based on efficiency so it sits away at the
battery it doesn't take a huge hit like a puzzle of other chipsets or like the
28 nanometer process mediatek ones that can have some really horrific standby
battery consumption time to test out the new speaker setup so we've got a front
facing speaker as well as the bottom speaker the max the first version has
only just the bottom speaker on there so both of these phones have the volume
already set to 100% I'm going to test the old model first
so it clearly sounds better to me on the me max too because it's got a little bit
more depth to it some more meds a little bit more bass overall a better
loudspeaker setup if you've seen my me six unboxing video and review I
encountered a lot of bugs and instability with the android 7 rom with
me UI 8 and so far so good now I only had this for a couple of hours now but
I've installed a few things that didn't work straightaway like for example
Google Play would crash on the me6 on the first Chinese stable rom and it
is working here and so far so good other applications that I could get a crash on
I can't on the me max - ROM and for those interested in the camera sensor
information so the Sony IMX 386 and then the front-facing sensor is a Samsung one
so you can get into the camera just by double tapping the volume down button
and it will launch the camera even if the phone is locked now won't give you
access to the gallery until you put your PIN code in or your finger in printers
red of course for security so you can see here that it's the typical standard
immediate camera app shutter rate in these conditions seems perfectly fine so
let's have a look and see the modes we get all the typical modes manual offers
settings there to tweak the white balance focus exposure and our ISO and
there are no more settings there and under video here we have slo-mo and time
lapse now slow-motion on these phones or all of the me phones that I've tested is
horrible I would never use it they also don't seem to support 1080p 60 frames
per second ever for some reason I've never seen it on their mobiles so by
default it's just HD video quality always have to go and change it to 4k if
you want to shoot in 4k for some reason it never saves these settings I think
it's intentional but it's annoying so focus mode we have continued autofocus
or tap so hopefully the focus is going to be good and I won't need to put it on
to tap if it's going to do its job properly which it doesn't do on the me
max somebody head out now get some samples just a quick
many review of the camera but also very quick comparison to then the max2 this
is the knee max okay so this is endures now and this is one area where the
front-facing camera on the main maps is quite poor now it's got absolutely no
control with settings using the front-facing camera and looking at both
of them I can see that well especially now that the exposure there is a lot
better on than being max - so they have tweaked and optimized that camera but I
don't know whether it's the same sensor or not I will have to look into that and
check that out but it doesn't look to me that we're getting a slight improvement
but still not wonderful on the me max - really and now those front-facing
cameras again side by side outside you can see that it looked to me to be about
the same when I step in the Sun they're back in the shadows see how the auto
exposure is handling that now a side by side video comparison now the me max
always seems to have moms with the focus this differently just override it with
tap to focus so I'm going to do now I'm just going to tap on the building on
both of them and I can't do it actually sorry on the max - because it has
continual autofocus enabled and I'll just walk over here get a close-up see
how it handles now focusing on this table I can see that the focus off - max
- is pulsing in and out at times
you
okay so that is all I'm going to cover here in this unboxing and first look of
the show meet me max - so it is a refined version really of the Mean Max
which I think was a successful mobile and really this one is a downgrade in
terms of performance as you've seen what that antutu score it's a lot lower
because they've gone for the standard in 6 - 5 processor but they'll probably
have their reasons behind it because they have plans but still I am
disappointed they didn't put the 660 or at least the 630 in here still it's an
efficient chipset that what the 5300 milliamp hour battery should mean
phenomenal battery life out of this device even though it does have a larger
screen on it so build quality it feels so much better compared to the previous
generation the loudspeaker has improved the camera has improved and overall I do
like the look of this and where it is heading the ROM so far does seem to be
stable I have not encountered any problems yet
whereas out of the box with the Mi Pad 3 or the Mi 6 straight away I had some
crashing some bugs and problems at least this hasn't happened yet but I will keep
you updated on that via my Twitter and of course in the full final review when
I will use this for a couple of weeks go over things like battery life more
benchmarks and just use in general how the audio quality is 4G performance
everything like that thank you so much for watching bye for now and if you do
have any questions let me know down in the comments and I will try to get
around to answering you